Something Like An Autobiography

by Akira Kurosawa

Circumstances have conspired, without my noticing it, to make me reach seventy-one years of age this year. Looking back over all this time, what is there for me to say, except that a lot has happened? Many people have suggested that I write an autobiography, but I have never before felt favorably disposed toward the idea. This is partly because I believe that what pertains only to myself is not interesting enough to record and leave behind me. More important is my conviction that if I were to write anything at all, it would turn out to be nothing but talk about movies. In other words, take “myself,” subtract “movies” and the result is “zero.” Not

The truth is that this individual of whom we are so proud is composed of such diverse elements as the boy he made friends with at nursery school, the hero of the first tale he ever read, even the dog belonging to his cousin Eugène. We do not exist through ourselves alone but through the environment that shaped us.… I have sought to recall those persons and events which I believe have played a part in making me what I am.* My own decision to write the present chapters, which in a slightly

Nevertheless, I am my father’s son. I, too, like both watching and participating in sports, and I approach sports in terms of single-minded devotion to a discipline. This is clearly my father’s influence.

Perhaps it is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.)

These lost sounds are all impossible to separate from my boyhood memories. And all are related to the seasons. They are cold, warm, hot or cool sounds. And they are allied with many different kinds of feelings. Happy sounds, lonely sounds, sad sounds and fearful sounds. I

When someone is told over and over again that he’s no good at something, he loses more and more confidence and eventually does become poor at it. Conversely, if he’s told he’s good at something, his confidence builds and he actually becomes better at it. While a person is born with strengths and weaknesses as part of his heredity, they can be greatly altered by later influences.

“If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.” Looking back on that excursion now, I realize that it must have been horrifying for my brother too. It had been an expedition to conquer fear.

“You might wonder what could be interesting about living in a hovel like this and eating slop like this. Well, I tell you, it’s interesting just to be alive.”

ORDINARILY, children are supposed to spend their childhood like saplings sheltered in a greenhouse. Even if on occasion some wind or rain of the real world slips in through the cracks, a child is not supposed to be weatherbeaten in earnest by the sleet and snow.

I no longer have any recollection of what she looked like. But I shall never forget her kindness.

The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public. There is an old story told in senryŭ verse about the

I can’t help wondering what fate had prepared me so well for this road I was to take in life. All I can say is that the preparation was totally unconscious on my part.

Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

Yama-san said: “If you want to become a film director, first write scripts.” I felt he was right, so I applied myself wholeheartedly to scriptwriting. Those who say an assistant director’s job doesn’t allow him any free time for writing are just cowards. Perhaps you can write only one page a day, but if you do it every day, at the end of the year you’ll have 365 pages of script. I began in this spirit, with a target of one page a day. There was nothing I could do about the nights I had to work till dawn, but when I had time to sleep, even after crawling into bed I would turn out two or three pages. Oddly enough, when I put my mind to writing, it came more easily than I had thought it would, and I wrote quite a few scripts.

When I reached a certain level of achievement in scriptwriting, Yama-san told me to start editing. I already knew that you can’t be a film director if you can’t edit. Film editing involves putting on the finishing touches. More than this, it is a process of breathing life into the work. I had already grasped this, so before Yama-san gave me the command, I had already been spending time in the editing room.

I learned a mountain of things about editing from Yama-san, but I think the most vital among them is the fact that when you are editing you must have the intelligence to look at your own work objectively.

“We can cut!” “I want you to cut!” “Cut!” Yama-san in the editing room was a bona-fide mass murderer. I even thought on occasion if we were going to cut so much, why did we have to shoot it all in the first place? I, too, had labored painfully to shoot the film, so it was hard for me to scrap my own work.

It goes without saying that in order to be a film director you must be able to direct actors on the set. A film director’s job is to take a script, make it into something concrete and fix that on film. To that end, he must give the appropriate instructions to the people handling the cameras, the lights, the tape recorders, the sets, the costumes, the props and the makeup. And he must also coach the actors in their delivery.

He often said, “If you as director try to drag an actor by force to where you want him, he can only get halfway there. Push him in the direction he wants to go, and make him do twice as much as he was thinking of doing.” The result is that in Yama-san’s films the actors seem to be relaxed and playing at what they are doing. A good example of this easy-going spirit was the comedian Enoken (Enomoto Ken’ichi). In Yama-san’s pictures he really runs wild, and his special qualities come out in full bloom.

people give him their best. Aside from this, there are three very important things I learned from Yama-san about actors. The first is that people do not know themselves. They can’t look objectively at their own speech and movement habits. The second is that when a movement is made consciously, it will be the consciousness rather than the movement that draws attention on the screen. The third is that when you explain to an actor what he should do, you must also make him understand why he should do it that way—that is, what the internal motivations in the role and the action are.

Naruse’s method consists of building one very brief shot on top of another, but when you look at them all spliced together in the final film, they give the impression of a single long take. The flow is so magnificent that the splices are invisible. This flow of short shots that looks calm and ordinary at first glance then reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath. The sureness of his hand in this was without comparison.

Every day I was eating six sweet bean cakes, so I guess I must have been pretty cute.

eyes. How could the Kurosawa who wolfed down six bean cakes a day and the Kurosawa who now sat there drinking saké like a fish be the same person? I later noticed her staring at me through a slightly opened door, as if she were observing the movements of some kind of monster. The original idea for The Saga of the Vagabonds came from the film director Yamanaka Sadao. The screenplay was written by Miyoshi Juro, a playwright, but here and there Yamanaka’s brilliance shone through it. (I later wrote my own script based on Yamanaka’s original, and this was filmed by Sugie Toshio in 1960.) We were on location in the Hakone Mountains at the coldest time of the year, in February. A bitter wind blew across these plains at the foot of a pure-white Mount Fuji all day long, and our hands and faces became cracked and wrinkled like silk crepe. We left for the location while it was still dark outside, and when we arrived there the sun was just beginning to strike the summit of the mountain, turning it a rosy pink. I’ll never forget the landscape I gazed at every day on the way to the location before starting the shooting, again during break periods and yet again on the way back to the inn. It’s disrespectful of me to say this about Takizawa, but the landscape impressed me far more deeply than what we were filming. In the morning as we rode along in our car in the wan light of predawn, we could see the old farmhouses on both sides of the road. Farmers dressed as extras, wearing their hair...

“This is it.” There was no logical explanation for my reaction, but I believed wholeheartedly in my instinct and did not doubt for an instant.

I was thirty-two years old. At last I had climbed to the base of the peak I had to scale, and I stood gazing up at my mountain.

They don’t attempt to dream new dreams; they only want to repeat the old ones. Even though it has been proved that a remake never outdoes the original, they persist in their foolishness. I would call it foolishness of the first order. A director filming a remake does so with great deference toward the original work, so it’s like cooking up something strange out of leftovers, and the audience who have to eat this concoction are in an unenviable position, too.

What dwells at the bottom of the human heart remains a mystery to me. Since that time I have observed many different kinds of people—swindlers,

The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.

The backbone of American film is the organization called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is built on the fundamental recognition of the fact that the art of motion pictures is intimately bound up with science. In order to do battle with the new

Yet pleasure in the work can’t be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew.

Characters in a film have their own existence. The filmmaker has no freedom. If he insists on his authority and is allowed to manipulate his characters like puppets, the film loses its vitality.

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.